


Femslash February 2017 Drabbles

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon Compliant, Drabbles, F/F, Femslash February
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-09-24 19:33:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 5,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9782042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: A collection of free write drabbles for Femslash February 2017, all stand alone. 250-500 words each, mostly 200-300 words.





	1. February 1: Clarke/Raven/Octavia; forbidden

After she gets over this idea that her whole existence is forbidden, because she’s this girl who never should have existed, who had to spend her whole childhood being as small and as quiet as she could so everyone around her could keep pretending they lived in a reality that had never known an _Octavia Blake_ –after she gets over that, and feels the real Earth hard and secure under her feet, nothing really matters anymore. Not rules or expectations or what other people want.

O’s never really known religion or faith, so when she says this is like being reborn, she means it in a literal sense. What she had before was no life. It didn’t count. She gets a do-over.

Raven deserves a do-over too–”since you cut free all that dead weight,” Octavia says, and reaches over to clink her mug against Raven’s.

“Finn and I broke up two days ago,” Raven answers, and toes her boot into the dirt next to the fire. “Don’t you think it’s a little soon?”

“I think it’s not soon enough,” Octavia answers. Then, because she knows what she wants, she shoves at Clarke’s shoulder, pulling her in. “What do you think, Clarke?”

Clarke doesn’t say anything. She looks at Raven with a brief flash of guilt-panic in her eye.

“You can be with him now if you want,” Raven reminds her, into the silence.

Octavia sends an exasperated sigh up to the stars. “You’re entirely missing the point, both of you. You can built your own space ship or bring a man back from the brink of death but you can’t–you can’t see what’s in front of you.”

“And what would that be?” Raven asks, dead pan, like she doesn’t believe Octavia could have anything of real importance to contribute. 

Or maybe she’s insulted. Which would be pretty dumb.

“I _mean_ ,” Octavia answers, slowly, taking first Raven’s hand, then Clarke’s, in her own. “Each other. And _me_.

Raven rolls her eyes and sighs and Clarke almost pulls away but they’re both smiling, and Octavia knows that she hasn’t won yet. But she will.


	2. February 4: Clarke/Raven; combustible

On the Ark, Raven was known as someone who had no fear. But it’s not true, was never true. She’s not dumb and she’s not careless and she doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want to blow herself up in some fiery explosion like some idiots she’s known, some people who are ready for the _cool death_. There is no cool death. 

She wants to live and when her heart beats fast but her fingers are still and she _knows_ she can do this and she’ll survive, that’s when she feels like she’s living the most.

She tries to explain this to Clarke, sitting up in the Dropship and listening to a party raging outside. They’re sitting so their shoulders touch. Raven wants to hold Clarke’s hand in her hand but Clarke’s hand might as well be an explosive. That’s how her heart beats. And worse.

“Is that how doing surgery feels?” Raven asks her.

“I don’t know. I guess. But there’s–I can’t think too much about what could happen, beyond believing the person will live.” She bites her lip for a moment, and her nose scrunches up and she looks cute. It’s a bit too much. “Not that I do surgeries a lot.”

It’s weird because they kissed last night and it was, in the moments before, like waiting for something to explode, that same feeling when she’s facing death and sure she won’t die and the two feelings so perfectly co-exist that she already knows she’ll chase that feeling again. And again and again. 

Clarke’s hand covers hers and Raven interlaces their fingers. Someone outside shouts with the clearest and most reckless joy and Raven’s heart combusts.


	3. February 5: Clarke/Anya; fire

Anya’s face in the firelight makes Clarke’s breath catch. It is so odd, now, to think that they first met in the morning, the full light of day, because now it’s only at night that Clarke sees anyone. They linger outside Niylah’s depot, the torchlight flickering.

“A lot of people still out there looking for you, Sky Girl,” Anya tells her, as if she didn’t know. “Your own people, too.”

“They won’t find me,” she answers, meaning _any of them_ , meaning _you won’t tell anyone about me_.

She hasn’t yet, at least.

Clarke knows it is not out of kindness. Most Grounders, if they knew who she was, would kill her. And the Sky People might kill Anya–they came close enough, once, and now she won’t go near them–and Anya wants them both alive.

For now at least.

Clarke travels during the night, hunts, trades, stays alive, keeps going, staves off the memories of nightmares. And during the day she sleeps, where she can, where she can. When she runs into Anya, never sure if it’s an accident or not, they find their hiding places together. They do not sleep. Clarke wants to ask her why, she she wants this, why she spares Clarke’s life again and again. But it feels like to ask would be to poke at a wild animal, to tempt fate, to curse God. So she keeps quiet.

“Someday someone will find you,” Anya says, now. “Someone who does not understand the Mountain. Or–” she glances over, and she doesn’t say the name, doesn’t say any name, but Clarke knows–”Someone who does.”


	4. February 6: Raven/Gina; lantern

It’s Gina who makes Raven’s tiny little one-room apartment look cute. She strings up Chinese lanterns. She puts a big, ornate quilt on the bed. (Their bed.) And little plants above the kitchen sink, cacti, so Raven can’t kill them by forgetting their water. (She asks why Gina won’t water them and she answers _I can’t do everything for your Reyes_ , and grins.)

She puts artwork on the walls: some of Clarke’s stuff, old posters she finds at the back of the record store, travel photography and maps. Magnets on the fridge, sometimes holding up little notes, which sometimes Raven even notices.

(Buy milk. Water those cacti!!! Bellamy called. I love you.)

Gina still owns a camera, a real rolls-of-film camera, and she takes pictures of them, of their friends, of the clouds, of random people in the street, and puts them in frames on top of the dresser or uses them as bookmarks in the spy novels and thrillers she leaves on the bedside table, next to her side of the bed.

Raven reads science magazines, trade journals, National Geographic, but sometimes she picks up the fast-paced adventures Gina leaves lying around, and, once, a slim volume of poetry, dog-eared and pencil-marked and old, found unexpectedly under the pillows.

The apartment is transformed, as she is. Some days she hardly recognizes herself. There’s real food in the fridge, next to the leftovers of yesterday’s takeout lunch, and a cup of stars drying on the dish rack by the sink.


	5. February 8: Clarke/Raven/Octavia; pavement

They’re already late, which bothers Clarke immensely, and Octavia and Raven not at all. It’s a party, Octavia points out: it’s not like it’s really possible to be _late_.

Raven hooks her arm through Clarke’s and says, “Yeah, but she’s just nervous. About the having two girlfriends thing.”

Octavia’s a few feet ahead of them, dancing a little to the song she’s had stuck in her head all day, and she turns around just before she reaches the corner and smiles, a mocking, loving grin. 

“But the two _best_ girlfriends, though.”

Clarke’s feet are hitting hard against the pavement and she’s so tense, Raven can feel it in the way their shoulders and their hips bump together. She doesn’t seem to find any of this funny.

“We don’t have to tell anyone,” Raven says, quietly.

“Um–yes we do,” Octavia cuts in, before Clarke can answer, or even look up. “I told you, I don’t want to be the hidden shameful girlfriend anymore.”

“I’m not ashamed of you–”

“Clarke.” She stops abruptly, and waits for the other two to catch up. “I know I’m late to the party but I–” she grabs Clarke by the jacket, pulls her close–”really like you. And I want everyone to know it.”

They’re almost to the party, the lights of Miller’s house visible up ahead and the slightest echo of music wafting to their ears. Raven can feel Clarke hesitating. Then she slides one hand to the back of Octavia’s neck, rough, but sweet, and kisses her, a no-fear kiss, and Raven knows it’s going to be all right.


	6. February 11: Clarke/Raven; astronaut

“My girlfriend,” Clarke announces, in the very serious voice of the slightly drunk, holding up her glass and pausing to gain the attention of the room, “is going to be an astronaut! Next round is on me!” 

Everyone claps and a few people cheer. Raven tugs on Clarke’s arm until she steps down off the chair she’d climbed up on, because she’s going to fall and break something, or get them kicked out any minute now, wraps an arm around her and makes her sit again. “Hey–don’t get ahead of yourself. It’s a summer internship at NASA. I’m not flying off into space.”

“Yet,” Clarke finishes. She gives Raven what she probably thinks is a very significant look and repeats, as seriously as she can with a smile tugging at the corners of her lips, “ _Yet_.”

Raven’s still sipping on her first beer so she’s not even feeling a buzz, while Clarke’s in the loopy funny headspace she always gets into when she’s had a bit too much. Her attempt at a serious face drops within moments, and then she’s bopping her head and rocking back and forth to the beat of the next song, singing a little under her breath.

“Yeah,” Raven answers. “Yet.” She’s quiet and she knows Clarke doesn’t hear her. Which isn’t the point: she just likes watching her beautiful girlfriend starting to dance like a goof in her chair. “Come on,” she says, louder, “take those crazy feet to the dance floor, huh?”

Clarke doesn’t need much convincing. And even though she doesn’t have the rhythm that she thinks she has, so they’re just swaying to some beat that only Clarke hears in her head, it’s fine. It’s more than fine. 

“You need to get me a hat,” Clarke says, suddenly, and Raven has to laugh.

“What sort of hat?” she asks, just playing along.

“A NASA hat, _obviously_.” She leans in close at the last word, until their noses touch, and Raven pulls her a bit closer with a hand on her back, just above her waist, so that Clarke completely loses her place and they end up kissing, messy and sweet, as the music changes again and the couples around them split up, re-arrange, pair up again.

“You got it,” Raven murmurs. “A NASA hat. You’ll look really cute.”

“I always look cute.”

“Yes.” She kisses her cheek. “That’s true. Yes you do.”


	7. February 12: Clarke/Maya; countryside

Clarke has spent every summer since she was eight in the countryside, where her grandparents live, and it’s peaceful and pleasant but a little bit boring, especially after a couple of weeks, especially when she starts high school and reading in the hammock tied between the trees in the back yard doesn’t cut it for entertainment anymore.

Then the summer Clarke is sixteen, she meets a girl. Maya is cute and she wears pastel dresses and platform sandals and she lives out here in the middle of nowhere all year round, and she knows all of the best summer spots.

They walk down to the lake and dip their feet in the shallows. They sun against the rocks. Later, Maya lends her one of the bikes from her cluttered, dusty garage, and they ride out to town and buy ice cream cones, and eat them slowly while they wander the long way home.

The ice cream melts over Maya’s fingers and Clarke just wants to lick it off, slowly and carefully and watching Maya’s eyes the whole time. But she holds back those thoughts, like she’s always held back thoughts like that before.

In July they go camping. In the middle of the night, Clarke listens to the night noises, the crickets, and frogs, and wonders what she’s scared of. That there’s something hidden in the dark, perhaps. Or maybe that there’s something hidden inside of her, that will still be there even when the morning breaks and the sun is shining again.


	8. February 13: Clarke/Anya; gorgeous

Clarke’s first thought when she sees her is _wow, she’s **gorgeous**_ , which is not the sort of thing one should be thinking about the enemy. Her second thought was, _I wonder if we’ll all make it out alive_.

Anya is gorgeous without her warpaint too. Beautiful in an unexpected way. She won’t talk to anyone at Camp Jaha, not even Lincoln, though Clarke has seen him try more than once. She sits in on meetings sometimes. Though she makes most of the Camp nervous. But she only explains her thoughts later, when she and Clarke are alone.

Clarke likes to think it’s because Anya trusts her, though she knows it’s just a matter of degree. Anya trusts her _more_ than she trusts Kane or Abby, more than she trusts Bellamy or Raven or Finn. She knows that, until she finds her way back to her people, Clarke is the best she can get, as far as confidantes or company go.

They don’t live together, but Anya’s in Clarke’s bed more nights than not, for angry sex that burns itself out and becomes, eventually, something quiet and not quite soft. Clarke traces Anya’s tattoos and says nothing. Anya lets her, for ten minutes, twenty, staring at the gray Alpha station walls and her own thoughts, Clarke’s sure, too far away for any measure of distance to describe. Without warning, then, she grabs Clarke’s hand in her own, and forces her back until her head’s against the pillow and Anya is towering over her, and leans in, leans in, with such force and such stealth that Clarke is terrified, until the very moment lips touch lips, of just what could possibly happen next.


	9. February 17: Raven/Octavia, wilderness

Raven understands that Octavia is in the wilderness. She’s wandered there herself: a wilderness of loss and grief, through which she stumbled half-blind for months, only half-aware of the film across her eyes, distorting everything. Alone in the world.

Octavia is not alone, of course, and Raven wasn’t either but she knows how deep the distortion goes. How it reaches inside. How it destroys your ability to perceive even the deepest truths with any clarity.

So she doesn’t fault Octavia for leaving. She didn’t fault Clarke, either, and if she could have done it herself, taken herself through a spirit walk in the woods, or wherever, whatever people do when they have two good legs and an open door, maybe she would have. Some days she’s sure she would.

But sometimes she still wishes Octavia were around, so she could tell her just how much she understands. She’s never gotten to say it in words before. The only emotions they’ve shared with each other, the private emotions between them, have been anger, so deep it bordered on rage, and longing and sickness and despair, and always late at night, always alone, and they never spoke of it after. And now Raven knows that she never will. Even if Octavia comes back someday, even if they both survive it all, these are secrets they’ll keep even from each other. Maybe, Raven thinks, she’s become a secret Octavia keeps even from herself.


	10. February 19: Clarke/Raven, spell

On rainy days they hole up in Clarke’s room and listen to what Clarke calls ‘downpour music’ and Clarke sketches or pulls out her paints while Raven works on spells. She’s truly terrible at writing spells.

But she absolutely won’t admit it.

Clarke hides her giggles when the magic goes wrong, as it almost always does, doesn’t get mad when Raven accidentally blows up her slippers–they were old and ratty anyway–and claps her hands whenever something actually _works_. When Raven manages to move Clarke’s stereo from one side of the room to the other, and using her words too, not her hands, Clarke jumps up from the floor and hugs her close and kisses her, which is unexpected, though it shouldn’t be. Raven can feel her smile, lips upturned against lips.

And Raven feels such joy, she’s sure she could raise the whole house from its foundations if she tried.

“Do it again,” Clarke whispers.

“I think that’s all I can manage in one night,” she answers, not because it’s true, but because she’s ready for a break, ready for the ease with which her fingers slide through Clarke’s hair or the perfect simple thrill over her skin when Clarke’s teeth pull at her lip. 

Clarke isn’t magical, but she brings out the magic in Raven every time.


	11. February 20: Raven/Gina, gloomy

Raven and Gina don’t really know each other. Only in passing, the way everyone in college knows everyone else in college: through mutual friends–Bellamy in particular–and because they live in the same dorm. Gina is pretty and quiet and funny, in an unexpected way. Sometimes Raven forgets she’s even there with the group, until a moment of quiet stretches a little long, and then into the pause Gina says something so sharp and so hilarious that suddenly she’s the center of the whole crowd. After this happens a few times, Raven starts to take notice. She starts to think about Gina, sometimes, even when she’s alone.

But they don’t really get to know each other until the gloomy day in late October when Gina knocks on Raven’s door and asks if she’d like a study buddy. “I just can’t concentrate,” she says, which is pretty obvious, the way she’s balancing _Othello_ on her head with one hand. “I need someone to prod at me if my eyes start to glaze over too much.”

"You should get Miller to give you a dramatic reading,” Raven answers, even as she opens her door wide and watches Gina walk in. “That should help.”

They work for about an hour, as the overcast sky outside gets darker, until early afternoon starts to feel more like dusk, or like an hour outside time itself, and raindrops start to splatter against the window pane. Then somehow their books end up on the floor, and Gina ends up with her head in Raven’s lap, quietly telling her about summers spent climbing trees in her grandparents’ backyard. Her voice is a quiet murmur that sometimes waxes, sometimes wanes, so quiet that Raven can barely hear her, until Gina’s words become something to feel rather than hear. Gina talks, and Raven cards her fingers gently through Gina’s curls.

She’s not sure what this means, or if it means anything at all. Gina is so relaxed, smiles so easily, that Raven cannot help but think: either this is nothing, or it’s the sort of normal everyday something that Gina knows intimately well. And if it’s the second, she’d like to have this knowledge, too. She’d like to know just what it means when Gina reaches up and touches the tips of her fingers to Raven’s cheek.


	12. February 21: Clarke/Anya, muscle

The neighborhood feud goes on all winter and into the spring but by summer everyone’s tired and the various factions reluctantly find themselves making peace. Clarke even agrees to host a barbecue in her backyard for the Fourth of July. Lincoln and Raven provide the music and Monty and Jasper bring the drinks and Niylah takes care of most of the food, and it’s somehow a decent time, without the tensions that Clarke almost worried herself sick thinking about, as she checked off the guest list and cleaned up the back porch.

And Anya comes, which is also unexpected and also nice.

Clarke has had more than one passive aggressive argument with the prickly biker from across the street, each and every one of which was of incredible importance at the time, and none of which has left any trace of itself behind, any more than the snow that once covered the sidewalk and the lawn. Now all Clarke can think, when she glances over to the grill, where Anya’s sipping a beer and talking to Bellamy about something that seems to cause neither of them particular grief, is that she is really very beautiful. She’s wearing the same boots she was wearing when they first met, in November, and a pair of jeans with holes at the knees, and a tanktop the color of the grass. It shows off her arms, which Clarke has never noticed before, the subtle muscles of her biceps, and Clarke follows the line down, down to her wrists and the jangle of bracelets there; down to her hands, which she’s using to gesture now, in that slight and restrained way she has; down to her fingers, which Clarke would very much like to suck into her mouth.

Which isn’t an option.

Yet.

They’ve just settled a truce, after all. That’s an accomplishment, and she doesn’t want to push it. So she smiles to herself and goes to grab a beer of her own and thinks, okay Griffin, one thing at a time.


	13. February 22: Raven/Octavia, coconut

Raven orders some sort of coconut drink, some tropical themed thing that sounds disgusting, and ends up tasting disgusting too, and tells herself she is absolutely, completely done with men.

This isn’t some sort of heartbroken declaration, all for show. Men have hurt her but that’s not their most significant sin. Men do not excite her. Men do not feel right to her.

Twenty-five minutes and half a drink later, too many thoughts later, she meets Octavia for the first time. Octavia is sitting with a group of rough looking folks, who are all laughing quite raucously, who look like they’re having a great time. Raven watches them because they’re the most interesting group in the room and she’s feeling a bit lonely today. She has no intention of talking to any of them. But she lets Octavia pull her into conversation when she–Octavia, twenty years old and toying with dropping out of college, totally uncertain about everything, totally in love with everything, and so wildly ready to live, as she explains later, while twining her fingers up with Raven’s like those string games that they used to play as girls–comes by the bar to pick up her table’s drinks.

She leaves her drinks with the rough group and comes back for Raven, because, Octavia says, she looks like she needs it. She looks like she needs someone coming back for her.

This isn’t something that will last, Raven’s pretty sure. Octavia doesn’t seem like the sort of person who can ever last, seems like she’ll always be one step out of the door. But that’s okay. All Raven wants is a woman who is beautiful and shocking and new, who will take her right out of herself, who is free and can make her feel free again, and if tomorrow what’s left is nothing but memory and vague half-remembered dreams, that is okay. She’ll have already taken everything she needs.


	14. February 25: Clarke/Raven/Octavia, blush

Clarke and Raven are living together in the disgusting bliss of new love when Bellamy’s little sister comes to visit them. She’s looking at schools in this area, he says, so please, just let her stay a couple of nights; she’ll take the couch, she won’t be trouble. And they agree, because it’s hard to say no to Bellamy’s puppy dog eyes and because Octavia sounds like a nice enough kid.

She’s just turned eighteen and she’s spent too long in a small town and Raven and Clarke’s apartment is the most magical place she’s ever been.

“How long have you lived here?” she asks, carefully, almost reverently stepping through the beaded curtain that separates the bedroom from the main room. (It’s a little hippie, Clarke admits, but it creates some sense of privacy, and anyway it was a gift.)

“About three months,” Raven answers. She’s lounged out on the living room chair with her leg up on the coffee table, browsing through an article on her laptop, and she doesn’t even look behind her when she answers.

“It’s great, you know,” Octavia tells her. “I want a place like this someday.”

“Are you planning on living in the dorms?” Clarke asks. “Or finding someplace off campus?”

“Bell wants me in the dorms. But I’d love a place of my own.” She’s standing by their fish tank, watching their goldfish flick his tail as he turns, and when she glances over her shoulder again, she sees that Clarke’s settled down on the arm of Raven’s chair, arm around her, and is pressing a kiss into her hair.

Octavia blushes a bright red when Clarke catches her staring.

Raven follows Clarke’s gaze, and her own eyes narrow. “You–don’t have a problem with us, do you?” It’s not really a fair accusation, as Clarke tries to tell her before Octavia can even draw a breath, but Raven’s barely out and a bit defensive still, and Octavia’s still shy and has to pull back the urge to cower at that accusatory stare.

“No,” she says quickly, and holds up her hands. “Not at all. I’m… jealous. I want to have what you have someday. All of this. It’s wonderful.”

Her cheeks darken again, despite herself, and she looks down at the floor. She’s pretty sure she has a crush on both of her brother’s friends, and it seems  a bit too much to hope that they won’t figure it out.


	15. February 26: Clarke/Maya, swamp

The town, only a few hundred people large, and surrounded almost entirely by swamp land, looks as creepy as a horror movie set and immediately gives Clarke the chills. “If this sickness is just a result of everyone being related to everyone else, I’m not sure there’s much we can do,” Raven jokes, as they pass the welcome sign. Her old Jeep bumps over the uneven dirt road, and Clarke warns her not to say stuff like that in front of anyone else.

“Oh, I know, I know,” Raven promises, but she’s still biting back a smile.

There’s only one hotel, of course, a tall three-story wooden building with faded flower wallpaper and fancy china on display in the dining room. It looks like a multi-family home that’s been re-purposed and that, Maya tells them, is exactly what it is. She’s younger than Clarke had expected–they’ve only talked through email before now–and her smile seems much too bright for this dark, humid place. She runs the business with her father and she’s glad for the guests. Not a lot of people come down this way anymore, she tells them.

“I bet,” Raven mumbles, and Clarke elbows her in the side.

That night, Clarke takes a bath in an old claw foot tub. She hasn’t taken a bath in years. There’s a detachable shower head too but it’s an awkward addition, much too new for all of this cracked tile and the way the windows all creak when she tries to slide them up, so she opts for the bath instead. It feels odd, to sink into the warmth, to be so surrounded by it. She’d meant to be quick but she stays in so long that the water goes cold and Raven’s pounding on the door before she’s done, asking to be let in.

“I need to brush my teeth, Clarke,” she yells. “What’s taking you so long?”

She doesn’t know.

Afterward, she sits on the window seat in her bedroom and stares outside at the full moon, cracked and riven by the bare branches of the backyard tree. Of course it’s a full moon. A place like this, a night like this, what else could it be?

She hears a noise outside in the hall, assumes it’s Raven coming by to borrow something, or show her some cool thing she’s found online, so she doesn’t bother asking who’s there before she opens the door. And it’s not Raven. It’s Maya, carrying an old silver tray and three mugs of tea. “I thought after your long trip, you might like something to wind down,” she says. And smiles softly. And Clarke smiles softly too.

“Raven’s not really a tea person,” she says, “but–I’d like some, sure. Come in.”

She’s not sure why she feels so nervous as she speaks or why she can’t keep her eyes off Maya as she walks into the room. Maya’s still wearing the blue dress she greeted them in that afternoon; her hair’s still pulled back with the same blue barrette on the side. But her feet are bare. And this somehow strikes Clarke as unbearably intimate, and she feels her own bare feet, her bare legs under her long sleep shirt, as some sort of affront to the propriety of this old, creaking, swaying house. She’s not sure if this is right. But she sits down across from Maya at the little round desk next to the window anyway, and carefully picks up her mug of tea. She catches Maya’s eye over the rim. Her heart flutters.


	16. February 27: Clarke/Anya, weak

Don’t be weak, Anya tells herself, when the Sky People capture her and tie her wrists together behind her back. They carry electric sticks and other forbidden weapons. They stomp across the dirt with heavy feet.

Don’t be weak, she repeats, as she sits in their gray rooms, refusing to speak. Listening to them.

They took Clarke as a prisoner too, which reeks of pathetic incompetence. Or something else. Anya sits and is utterly still and does not let them read her, does not acknowledge Clarke is looking at her, does not speak, and she wonders if Clarke is truly the leader, like Anya thought she was.

A woman with her hair worn loose elbows her way into the room, so straight-backed, so wild-eyed, that Anya knows right away she is the leader here, in fact, just as surely as she knows the stranger is someone special to Clarke. Someone who has trained her, or a relative.

The woman wipes the dirt from Clarke’s face and unties her hands and pulls her close, kisses her forehead, starts to cry. Anya doesn’t move.

Later, Clarke explains everything, but nothing is a revelation; a few more pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place but nothing is altered. Anya rubs her wrists where the plastic ties cut into her skin and turns away, staring out one of their windows at their haphazard, messy camp, their proto-village.

“Will your people march on the Mountain?” is all she asks, the first words she’s said since she was shoved through the gates.

“Will yours?” Clarke asks in return. “Or will they march on us?”

Anya turns back to her slowly. Her own face is still dirt streaked and her skin dirt chapped; she is cracking apart right in front of Clarke’s eyes. “Our common enemy may be your salvation,” she says at last, and makes it sound like a warning.


	17. February 28: Raven/Gina, passionate

Gina is soft and cute and gently flirty, so friendly that Raven cannot always tell what is flirting and what is just being nice. They drink raspberry lemonades on Bellamy’s balcony in June. They go to the beach and wander along the shoreline and watch the water rush up and over their feet. They bake brownies with Clarke and Octavia on Sunday night and eat them watching cringeworthy romantic comedies, Gina’s leg against Raven’s leg, and that night Gina falls asleep with her head on Raven’s lap while Octavia lies on the floor and tells them stories that Raven can only half hear.

Gina is sweet but she’s bold when she asks Raven out because, she says, it’s been long enough. Too long pretending.

They eat out at a restaurant with an outdoor patio and candles on the table. It’s September but still warm and Gina wears sandals so that Raven can see her painted toes, red and chipped like she must have painted them when summer was still strong.

She expects they’ll part at Gina’s apartment door, and is so shocked at Gina’s kiss that for a long moment, she has no idea how to respond.

Later, she admits that she never expected Gina to be passionate. She never expected to be on her back in a bed of unmade sheets, spine arching up, so tense she aches down to her very core and her toes scrabbling at the mattress edge. She never expected Gina to kiss her hard while her world explodes in the stars she’s always wanted to see, has never seen up close like this, so that when she regains her breath it’s Gina’s breath and she is boneless and useless and softer now than Gina ever appeared to be. Gina’s fingers are tangled up in her hair.

And Raven tries to speak and can’t, and Gina pulls her in close again, closer, and kisses even those fragments of words away.


End file.
